SIENA JEAKLE ’15

The holiday season is upon us, and that means we’re soon going to have a few luxurious moments of free time. Two weeks of relaxation to spend talking to our family and making memories. Two weeks of wonderful nothing.

However, there is a war on nothing. Our phones are designed to zap out boredom the second it starts to hit us; we never have to be unoccupied. We usually try to avoid boredom, but I’m here to say that boredom is not a bad thing.

Since the beginning of time, mankind has been battling the great, relentless foe that is boredom. Back in the day, the only way to cope was to create. Think of all the great discoveries of history. None of them could have been possible without boredom. Take astronomy, for example. Guys like Galileo and Kepler, they had no phones to look down at, so instead they looked up. They did that for long enough and somehow figured out that the universe is heliocentric and the planets’ orbits are elliptical and all that jazz.

I hold that boredom also found America. Sure, explorers and monarchs had their reasons, Gold, Glory, God, and what not. But when it comes down to it, the Age of Exploration could be renamed, “The Age of Looking Around for Somewhere More Interesting Than This Place.” Thank goodness Columbus had nothing better to do.

Picture a time when there was so little to do that two guys thought up Calculus at the same time. Yes, they were geniuses, but people also just had so much more time to THINK.

Boredom spurs creativity. It always has, and I really believe it always will. It’s not those times that we choose to sit down and work that the best ideas come to us; it’s the in between times. When we’re not doing anything at all. Those silent moments, the alone moments. Not alone on our phones or quietly with close friends or watching Netflix or even doing homework.

Louis C.K. talked about this when he was on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. C.K. asserts:

“You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person.”

In East-West Meditation class, we learn how to be; the art of just existing, living freely. Most of us just are not free from our technology. It sounds severe, but how often do most of us even try to put away our phones? A lot of the time it’s no fault of our own. This is the world we’re growing up in, and we need to be able to operate within it.

I’m not criticizing the use of phones and technology, but it’s important for us to know who we are without them. We just have to be able to be alone. We absolutely have to. Being alone is a vital part of being human and knowing who we are, though it’s not always comfortable to do so

A little dose of nothing is good for everyone. Boredom forces us to be creative, and creativity is fun. So this Christmas break, turn your phone off and give your mind a break too, and let it roam wherever it wants to.

Just listen to Steve Jobs: “I’m a big believer in boredom. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity and out of curiosity comes everything. All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”